# Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02145 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02145/

## Key facts

- Cited by 327 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 53 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [Tip-Adapter: Training-free CLIP-Adapter for Better Vision-Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03930/) (2021)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10984/) (2023)
- [Virtual KITTI 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10773/) (2020)
- [Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04994/) (2021)
- [Visual-Language Prompt Tuning with Knowledge-guided Context Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13283/) (2023)
- [Exploring Visual Prompts for Adapting Large-Scale Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17274/) (2022)
- [Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02153/) (2023)
- [DIODE: A Dense Indoor and Outdoor DEpth Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00463/) (2019)
- [Learning to Recover 3D Scene Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09365/) (2020)
- [Single-Image Depth Perception in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03901/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 327)

- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15506/) (2024)
- [GEN3C: 3D-Informed World-Consistent Video Generation with Precise Camera Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03751/) (2025)
- [DepthSplat: Connecting Gaussian Splatting and Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13862/) (2024)
- [MoGe-2: Accurate Monocular Geometry with Metric Scale and Sharp Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02546/) (2025)
- [UniDepthV2: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation Made Simpler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20110/) (2025)
- [Lotus: Diffusion-based Visual Foundation Model for High-quality Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18124/) (2024)
- [SpatialBot: Precise Spatial Understanding with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13642/) (2024)
- [Lumina-mGPT: Illuminate Flexible Photorealistic Text-to-Image Generation with Multimodal Generative Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02657/) (2024)
- [RealmDreamer: Text-Driven 3D Scene Generation with Inpainting and Depth Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07199/) (2024)
- [Cameras as Relative Positional Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10496/) (2025)
- [Learning Temporally Consistent Video Depth from Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01493/) (2024)
- [STream3R: Scalable Sequential 3D Reconstruction with Causal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10893/) (2025)
- [Marigold: Affordable Adaptation of Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09358/) (2025)
- [What Matters When Repurposing Diffusion Models for General Dense Perception Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06090/) (2024)
- [PF3plat: Pose-Free Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22128/) (2024)
- [Depth Any Video with Scalable Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10815/) (2024)
- [InFusion: Inpainting 3D Gaussians via Learning Depth Completion from Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11613/) (2024)
- [MoDGS: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting from Casually-captured Monocular Videos with Depth Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00434/) (2024)
- [Pixel-Perfect Depth with Semantics-Prompted Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07316/) (2025)
- [DiffSplat: Repurposing Image Diffusion Models for Scalable Gaussian Splat Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16764/) (2025)
- [PhyRecon: Physically Plausible Neural Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16666/) (2024)
- [Image Generators are Generalist Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20329/) (2026)
- [DeepVerse: 4D Autoregressive Video Generation as a World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01103/) (2025)
- [UniRelight: Learning Joint Decomposition and Synthesis for Video Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15673/) (2025)
- [GScream: Learning 3D Geometry and Feature Consistent Gaussian Splatting for Object Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13679/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular depth estimation is a fundamental computer vision task. Recovering 3D depth from a single image is geometrically ill-posed and requires scene understanding, so it is not surprising that the rise of deep learning has led to a breakthrough. The impressive progress of monocular depth estimators has mirrored the growth in model capacity, from relatively modest CNNs to large Transformer architectures. Still, monocular depth estimators tend to struggle when presented with images with unfamiliar content and layout, since their knowledge of the visual world is restricted by the data seen during training, and challenged by zero-shot generalization to new domains. This motivates us to explore whether the extensive priors captured in recent generative diffusion models can enable better, more generalizable depth estimation. We introduce Marigold, a method for affine-invariant monocular depth estimation that is derived from Stable Diffusion and retains its rich prior knowledge. The estimator can be fine-tuned in a couple of days on a single GPU using only synthetic training data. It delivers state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of datasets, including over 20% performance gains in specific cases. Project page: https://marigoldmonodepth.github.io.